Practices

There is a fair worry that punch shaped exercise simply practises the punch. The test is easy: if the angry story is still running in your head, it is rehearsal.

You can check mid set. Ask what you are actually attending to. Counting, the burn in your arms and the sound of your breathing are all signs the…

Rather than noting each impulse in your head, touch a finger for each one. Thumb to index, thumb to middle, and on round the hand.

Watching impulses go past is harder to sustain than it sounds once you are stirred up, and a purely mental tally tends to slip away without you…

When one thing fills your view, everything around it stops registering. You can be staring hard and taking in almost nothing.

This is why an angry judgement can feel so sharp and turn out to be so poor. The person in front of you has become the whole picture, and the details…

Squeeze the hand, hold it for a few seconds, then let it go slowly. The letting go is where the calm is, and it works better once you have practised the long version.

Full muscle relaxation, working through the body group by group, takes about twenty minutes and is worth doing a handful of times. Once your body…

Movement can settle you or wind you further up, and the difference is mostly what your mind is doing while you move.

Pacing the kitchen while you build the case against someone keeps the whole system revved. The same twenty minutes spent counting breaths or noticing…

Not feeling sleepy is not the same as not being affected. Younger drinkers often stay awake through a great deal more than their body is actually handling.

The tiredness that ends an older person's night arrives much later, so the evening runs on and the amount climbs with it. Which is why a limit has to…

A tablet is not safer because of where it started out. Taken by someone it was never prescribed for, it is simply an unprescribed drug.

Borrowed stimulants get treated as harmless because a doctor's name is on the box somewhere. The dose was worked out for another person's body and…

When someone tells you how much they use, take it as a floor rather than a total. Then keep that adjustment to yourself.

Under-reporting is rarely a lie. There is legal risk, there is shame, and there is genuinely losing count. So plan around a larger figure than the…

Most people can tell you exactly why the thing is a bad idea. The trouble arrives later, when feeling is running high and all that reasoning is nowhere to be found.

So treat it as a doing problem rather than a knowing problem. Decisions made calmly and in advance travel into hard moments much better than…

The fog after cannabis is not gone by morning. In younger users learning can stay dulled for several days, so Saturday night is still in the room on Wednesday.

That changes what to look at. Rather than arguing about the night itself, keep a rough note of the days that follow: what got read, what stayed in,…

When someone keeps doing the risky thing after every explanation, the missing piece is usually not information. The pull is simply louder than the knowledge.

Which means another lecture is mostly wasted breath, while changing what is within reach is not. Fewer bottles in the house, a route home that avoids…

The useful part is not the chart on the wall. It is that the person could think of things to do instead, and that took months of quiet work to arrive at.

Someone else's list of alternatives will not hold, because they thought of theirs and you did not. Build yours slowly, adding what has genuinely…

Charge the phone in another room overnight. Not face down, not on the far side of the bed: another room, so that reaching it means standing up.

Distance is what does the work here, which is why the halfway versions never hold. If you use it as an alarm, a cheap clock settles that for the…

Use a timer you can see rather than one you have to read. A dial where the coloured part shrinks tells you how much is left at a glance, with no arithmetic in the way.

Set it for the length of the task, or for the length you can stand, and leave it where your eye falls. A digital countdown asks you to work out what…

When something has sat undone for weeks, ask what next month's version of you would say about it. Relieved it is finished, or honestly indifferent?

If future you would be relieved, this is procrastination and it needs a hand: a smaller first step, a set time, someone alongside you. If future you…

An hour exists somewhere in the week for almost anything. That is what makes yes so easy, and it is not the same as having an hour.

The question that gets skipped is not whether the time exists but what is already claiming it. Answering that means calling to mind everything you…

Practise one sentence until it comes out on its own: let me check and come back to you. It buys the few minutes you need to answer truthfully.

The moment of being asked is the hard part, because the yes is out of your mouth before any checking has happened. Having one phrase ready means you…

The cheapest place to deal with a task is before it ever reaches your list. Some things are better declined in the moment they are offered.

Once something is written down it starts costing you. It gets read, moved to next week, copied out again, felt guilty about. Filtering at the door…

Before a task you have been circling for days, give five minutes to moving your body. A brisk walk or a couple of flights of stairs is often enough to make starting feel less like pushing at a door that will not open.

Treat the movement as part of the task rather than something virtuous you do separately. The lift is short lived, so it helps most sitting right…

Light movement while you work is not stolen from the work. Rocking a foot, standing up, a slow circuit of the room on a call: for many people the concentration goes up rather than down.

Worth testing instead of assuming. Take one task you always do sitting still and do it moving gently: read on your feet, take the meeting walking,…